The Department for Transport has published its national policy statement for national networks against which planning decisions on nationally significant transport infrastructure projects will be made.

The Government’s flagship planning policy, the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), needs to do more to protect against unsustainable development in England and ensure communities aren’t subject to unwanted housing development, according to a report from the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee.

Councils should set out how they will investigate alleged cases of unauthorised development and make officers’ reports easier to find on their websites, according to a report from the Local Government Ombudsman.

The Law Commission has published its final report and draft Bill on rights to light. This followed their consultation on the subject, which ran from 18 February 2013 to 16 May 2013. The Commission sought to investigate whether the law by which rights to light are acquired and enforced provides an appropriate balance between the important interests of landowners and the need to facilitate the appropriate development of land. It considered how the law might be clarified and examined whether the remedies available to the courts are reasonable, sufficient and proportionate.

More than half the world’s population now live in a city. By the middle of the century, it’ll be 70%. This site has been established to explore all the topics affecting that growing slice of humanity. Focus is on matters such as infrastructure, governance and the built environment. The content is broken down into five sections: Business: finance, economics, and the corporate world; Politics: how cities are planned, managed and governed; Transport: planes, trains and automobiles; Skylines: architecture, demographics, and the fabric of the cities around us; Horizons: a place for ideas: past, present, and especially future. The site also keeps tabs on the topics covered most frequently, and lists them in the ‘trending’ section of the menu bar.

This report from the London Society revisits the initial aspirations of those who devised the city’s green belt in the first half of the twentieth century and provide a spotlight beneath which it can be considered in the context of London today.

As part of the ‘Reuniting Health with Planning’ project, the Town and Country Planning Association has launched a resource identifying the potential for planners and public health officers to work together to support people to live lifestyles that will help them to maintain a healthy weight. This report which draws on current evidence and experience, is designed to assist practitioners in identifying common ground, and areas with the potential for collaboration. The resource presents an illustration of how a healthy-weight environment could be planned.

David Rudlin was announced as the winner of the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize on 3 September 2014. David’s submission argues for the near-doubling of up to 40 existing large towns to provide new homes for 150,000 people per town, built over 30-35 years. The entry imagines a fictional town called Uxcester to develop the concept. It argues that expansion of existing towns is the best way to accommodate growth, regenerate town centres, and protect much-loved countryside and the setting of surrounding villages. David argues that there may be as many as 40 cities in England that could be doubled in size in this way, such as Northampton, Norwich, Oxford, Rugby, Reading and Stafford.